Is It Worth Exercising Even If You Are Sleep Deprived?
Should you exercise if you don’t sleep enough? A study published earlier this year takes a good, real-life look at this issue and finds that people who typically sleep five (just five!) hours were able to achieve good results during strength training with resistance bands. I’ll dive into this research in more detail below, but first let’s cover the basics.
How much sleep do you need to grow muscles?
A healthy lifestyle should include a healthy amount of sleep, which will range from seven to nine hours, depending on the person . If you exercise a lot, this may increase your need for sleep; athletes often sleep nine to ten hours.
When it comes to muscle growth specifically, there is no exact number of hours required. Exercise researcher Brad Schoenfeld, who posted about the new study on Instagram , mentioned in the caption that there is likely a minimum amount of sleep we need to achieve results, but “exactly how much is unclear and will likely vary by individual.” “
In other words, science can’t answer this question for you yet, but you probably can’t get by on too little sleep. Seven hours is probably fine. How about five? This is exactly what the study looked at.
Can I build muscle by sleeping five hours a night?
Yes, most likely! The recent study doesn’t answer that question conclusively, of course (no study does), but it does provide compelling evidence that five hours a night is probably fine .
You can read the full study here . Participants were men who did not typically engage in strength training and were excluded from the study if they were diagnosed with sleep disorders. The 36 men were divided into three groups: a group that slept an average of seven hours a night, a group that averaged about five hours a night, and a control group that averaged more than seven hours a night.
The control group did not train in the study. The seven o’clock and five o’clock groups did it. (Perhaps we can think of the control group as the “What if I slept instead of going to the gym?” group).
Results? For some muscle groups, the seven-hour group got slightly larger gains than the five-hour group, but for others they were about equal. Both groups gained more muscle mass than the non-exercising control group. The authors write, “The results of the present study suggest that the value of 7 hours as the minimum nighttime sleep time may be moderated when it comes to recovery status associated with muscle strength.”
The study has its limitations, including the fact that it only involved men, that they used resistance bands instead of barbells or dumbbells, and that the subjects were not trained to begin with (which made it easier for them to grow muscles). But the results are consistent with what just about any trainer or fitness enthusiast could tell you: Getting a full night’s sleep is great, but it’s not necessary to make progress in the gym.
Consistency is more important than getting the details right
How can this be if rest is important for muscle growth? Well, first of all, rest is not a magic spell that is supposed to do its job continuously. (You don’t even need full rest days if your workload is distributed properly, but that’s a whole other conversation.)
But ultimately, the main lesson that every experienced gym-goer would like to teach every new gym-goer is that doing most things correctly most of the time trumps trying to get everything to line up perfectly sometimes. If you only exercise after you’ve had a good night’s sleep, you may not be able to exercise as much as you’d like. Prioritize consistency—getting to the gym whenever you can—and you’ll be able to realize those gains much better.